Los Angeles Filmforum and LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibition) invite you to join us for a rare screening of early film works by Los Angeles artist Steve Roden, presented in conjunction with the exhibition, Shells, Bells, Steps and Silences, currently on view at LACE. This screening includes Roden's first film, "the dreams of ophelia", from 1989, as well as many never before screened super 8mm projects from early 1990's - some of which will be accompanied by improvised sound scores performed live by the artist. The evening will also include Roden's 2011 16mm film, Striations, inspired by Dennis Oppenheim's early films, Gary Beydler's Hand Held Day, and the work of Jess.

Roden's working process uses various forms of specific notation (words, musical scores, maps, etc.) and translates them through self-invented systems into scores; which then influence the process of creating the work. These scores, rigid in terms of their parameters and rules, are also full of holes for intuitive decisions and left turns. The inspirational source material becomes a kind of formal skeleton for the finished abstract works. In his visual works, translations of information such as text and maps become rules and systems for generating visual actions such as color choices, number of elements, and image building.

Special Thanks to Robert Crouch, Santi Vernetti, Carol Stakenas

Steve Roden has been exhibiting his visual and sound works since the mid 1980s, and has had numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally, including: Mercosur Biennial Porto Alegre Brazil, Centre Georges Pompidou Paris, San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, UCLA Hammer Museum Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art EMST Athens Greece, Singuhr-Horgalerie in Parochial Berlin, Center for Book Arts New York, The Kitchen New York, Pomona College Museum of Art, La Casa Encendida Madrid, Susanne Vielmetter LA and Berlin Projects, Studio la Citta Verona Italy, and others. In 2010, curator Howard Fox organized the exhibition steve roden / in between: a 20 year survey, which opened at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, and was accompanied by a full color catalog.

His works are in the permanent collection of the following institutions: The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, CA; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA; The Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas, Austin, TX; The Palm Springs Museum, Palm Springs, CA; The Pomona College Museum of Art, Pomona, CA; The ASU University Art Museum, Tempe, AZ; The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece.This screening is made possible with the generous support of the Pasadena Art Alliance.

LACE is proud to present Shells, Bells, Steps And Silences, a new video installation and film survey by Los Angeles artist Steve Roden, curated by LACE Associate Director/Curator Robert Crouch. While Roden has been making films for over 20 years, this is the first body of work he has made with video exclusively, although the visual language and the approach to performance is certainly an extension of his 2011 film, Striations. Shells, Bells, Steps And Silences incorporates 3 research projects conducted by the artist over the past year: a collection of sea shells acquired by Roden from the estate of modern dancer Martha Graham, notes from a recent residency at the Walter Benjamin archive in Berlin, and John Cage's seminal 4'33", a work that Roden performed daily over the course of an entire year.

The largest work in the exhibition is a three-channel video and six channel audio work entitled Shells, Bells, Steps And Silences. It documents 40 short performance events that collide via chance operation - creating a situation where the video clips are constantly "improvising" in different combinations. The score for the piece was composed using Benjamin's "thematic symbols" to determine actions, objects used, visual/sound relationships, and various permutations of time as related to variations of the individual timings of the movements of Cage's 4'33". Many of the objects used as instruments in the film are from Graham's estate.Several silent single channel works are also on view, including Everything She Left Behind That Fits In My Hand, a film of Roden interacting with the objects in his Graham collection, a lexicon of the various ways that Benjamin crossed out unwanted words in his notebooks, and a series of stop motion animated "loops" related to a postcard found in Benjamin's archive that pictures the interior of a cathedral in Siena.----------------------Filmforum's screening series is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission; the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles; the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; and the Metabolic Studio. Additional support generously provided by American Cinematheque. We also depend on our members, ticket buyers, and individual donors.

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